Subirana Ortín, Jaume
SUBIRANA ORTÍN, JAUME
Full Professor of Catalan literature at the Department of Humanities, Universitat Pompeu Fabra. PhD in Catalan Philology (1999) and BA in Philosophy and Arts from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His research interests include literature, cultural history, space and collective identity, with a special interest in Catalan culture and literature.
He coordinates the Grup d’Estudis de Cultura Catalana (GECC). At Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, he promoted of the IdentiCat research group (2021 SGR 01174) on Language, culture and identity in the global era, of which he was a member until 2025. He has been Principal Investigator of the projects “Writers, community and recognition in peninsular peripheral literatures, 1972-2022” (PID2021-127226NB-I00) and “Functions of the past in contemporary Catalan culture: institutionalization, representations and identity” (FFI2011-24751), and has participated as a researcher in other funded projects. He is one of the founders of the International Society for Polysystem Studies (ISPS).
His recent works include Literatura, llengua i lloc. Termodinàmica aplicada (Anagrama, also in Spanish), Cultural Organizations, Networks and Mediators in Contemporary Ibero-America (Routledge, with Diana Roig-Sanz), Construir con palabras. Escritores, literatura e identidad en Cataluña, 1859-2019 (Cátedra) and The Barcelona Reader. Cultural Readings of a City (Liverpool UP, with Enric Bou).
He was Associate Professor in the Arts and Humanities Department at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (1998-2018), where he directed the website Lletra (2000-2004). He has also been a visiting professor at Duke University (1996), the University of British Columbia (2007), Brown University (2011), Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia (2012), Trinity College, Hartford (2018) and the University of Chicago, where he held the Joan Coromines Chair in Catalan Studies (2025). He has also carried out research stays at the Unit of Culture Research at Tel Aviv University (2010, with Itamar Even-Zohar) and, as a Fulbright Scholar, at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago (2017).
Writer and translator, he has translated into Catalan, among others, works by Ray Bradbury, Billy Collins, Seamus Heaney, Ted Kooser, Berta Pinán, Gary Snyder and Robert L. Stevenson.
From 2004 to 2006 he directed the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes, and from 2018 to 2022 was vice-president of PEN Català. From 2022 to 2024 he was deputy director of the Humanities department at UPF.